Love-Hate Relationship to Meetings

August 8, 2012

phew. 2.75-hr organize-the-organizers meeting with housing defense coalition. sometimes i wish my body could be possessed by a ghost who adores doing admin.

even though the host cooked a meal for us, even though half the mtg took place on a nice deck among the redwoods, and even though a large part of me thrills at the part of life where you get to accomplish stuff, i still left feeling the way i leave most meetings: drained.

relatedly (maybe, who knows, i’m tired). how the fuck do you build horizontalism when ppl so clearly have different strengths, skills, and time/energy capacities? and when the capacities are not always clear/consistent? (answer: have clear ways of plugging in at different levels of commitment. answer-beneath-that-answer: this still requires someone(s) to figure out how those duties should get split up, and who will bottom-line them, and who will collect and sort the information that comes out of them, which requires a certain level of standardization but not so much that people have to learn a stupidly specific and unintuitive vocabulary just to accomplish simple things. ultimately, even with more people on board, the workload does not actually decrease! aaah!)

i admit it: i thrive in projects where there’s a certain amount of hierarchy. not that i can’t do the collective thing, but in order for that to work well it seems like you need a good handful / majority of people who really know what the fuck they’re doing, and who are dedicated and won’t flake.

sigh. anyway, bout to finish this novel and pass out! good night, internet.